Update on Stir Crazy Grace

I need to tackle the name of this blog again.  It started when I was overseas but I never really wrote about cooking and grace in Lagos, Nigeria! (see earlier post on this subject)

There are a couple of things about me that I love.  I love to cook and bake, and I see Grace everywhere.

I am an incorrigible baker and a compulsive cook.  I could spend days reading recipes, writing changes to recipes, trying recipes — my biggest problem is who to feed?  I have got a question for my Creator: why make me want to cook constantly and only give me a family of 3?  Maybe there’s someone I am supposed to be cooking for and just haven’t met my match yet.

So, you could think that Stir Crazy is about me stirring up some bread dough, or some cinnamon rolls, or a pot of soup — all of which I have done just these past few days.

But Stir Crazy to me is a riff on being in this world but not of this world.  I have always felt like I didn’t quite belong here, or at least, that I was tuned in a little differently.  Don’t we all feel this way, if we get right down to it?

Stir-crazy conjures up a cabin in the woods in the winter, cold outside, and you’re getting a little gritchy with your family.  And stir-crazy is what I feel sometimes, not gritchy with the neighbors or family so much as needing to grow, needing to breathe bigger, needing to love bigger — needing to let the love and the me that is inside me get outside me.  How to let my heart be fed and grow and share it?  How to share the me that is inside with the world that is outside?  How to be the person I was made to be?  How to be my highest self?  How to be the woman God made me?

It’s not so much discomfort here; it’s about the stirring up that spurs me to growth, that pushes me.  Life is constant exodus, and it’s that stirring within me that propels me to that.  And that stirring means I can never be completely “at rest”.  It’s a “crazy” but a good crazy — it’s grace stirring me.

Not only is there grace stirring in me; it’s in every one of us.  We have to be still enough — still the external stirring up that is done to us from the outside so much — to sense that grace.

There is grace in each of us, and grace in every bit of this world.  It’s grace that made the world and keeps the world.  It is “given”; that’s what grace is.  Grace is all the beauty around us; the laughter of children, the cycle of life and death and life; grace is beauty and love and truth.  It is in the beauty, but it is in the seemingly ugly too.  At the bottom of the ugly is always the opportunity for grace to be made visible.  It depends on your vision.  You have to claim grace to see grace.

So, Stir-Crazy Grace!